You can’t let anyone tell you what to do, how to paint. You have to know yourself. There’s a difference between exhibiting work that talks about nothing basically and then there’s work that comes from your soul.”

It’s really so wonderful just to mix these forms and shapes while you’re painting. But I don’t know what I’m doing sometimes. So I’m just going to keep painting and discovering, and experimenting.”

If you begin to explain art, you’re going to lose it. I think you can’t talk about it. You have to do it. You have to mess with it. You have to experiment with it. And like I said, it’s that language. It just happens.”

There are these strange questions that people ask you all the time. Are you a Black artist? Are you an artist? Why do I even have to answer any of it? But you know, they use that to explain you, to color and place you. And to make that separation.”

When the world didn’t quite live up to her expectations, artist Barbara Bullock, the little girl from Philly, imagined a different one.

 In it, when Barbara jumped up on her chair, excited to watch a “Little Red Riding Hood” movie in her elementary school auditorium, she wasn’t forced to leave the room because of the ruckus. In Barbara’s world, fashioned in the paper shapes she cut out to represent the school of her imagination, Barbara was the teacher’s favorite.

 Even then, Bullock now says, “I was always being creative.”

 On Sept. 23, Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill is scheduled to open an exhibit showcasing the 50-year career of a Germantown artist whose swirling, painted, 300-pound paper collages have become a vibrant hallmark. In “Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision,” the museum considers the work of a woman revered not only for her talent, but for her commitment to creating in a way that represents – and serves - her community.

 “The focus of our show is not only on her six-decade retrospective, but Barbara has entrusted Woodmere with her teaching archive. She made her living as a teacher,” said William Valerio, the museum’s Patricia Van Burgh Allison director and CEO. “Barbara is an artist whose works reflect the interface between her time in the studio and her time in the classroom. And that is very exciting.”

 For much of her career, Bullock taught at Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, now the Village of Arts and Humanities, founded by dancer and choreographer Arthur Hall in North Philadelphia. Bullock has taught older adults at Center in the Park in Germantown and men and women who are incarcerated.

The artist infuses her work with subject matter that includes the culture and spirituality of the African diaspora, history and current events. She has commented, artistically, on the death of Trayvon Martin, and instructed children on making “spirit houses” filled with memories and feelings. She used her travels in Africa to inform her depiction of the human body.

 Bullock’s award-winning work, collected by museums and universities, inspired by culture and controversy, undergirded by the support of a collective of artist friends, and irrevocably linked to life in Philadelphia, will be on display at Woodmere through Jan 21.

 On these pages, we offer a snapshot coupled with Bullock’s comments expressed in conversations with Valerio, curators Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims, friend and fellow teacher Diane Pieri, and Hildy Tow, Woodmere’s curator of education.